A Nice Escalade For A Sunday Afternoon

Today I went rock climbing/hiking with Benoît and Adélie at Sixt Fer a Cheval, a small town about an hour away from Bonneville, it is not very far from Mt. Blanc.  It took us about two hours to get to the top of the climbing site, but only forty five minutes to come down.

The beginning of the climb was nice, tranquille, but then the vertical climbing started and I went very slowly and tried not to look down. We were all attatched, the ropes and everything was secure and the station had wires that we could attatch to.  Everything was going alright, until we got to a bridge, a hanging bridge.  Adélie was half-way across the bridge when I came on and we started laughing about how it reminded us of the scene in Shrek where Donkey and Shrek are on the bridge going to the castle, and Shrek shakes the bridge while Donkey is scared to death.  We reproduced the scene in French on the bridge except that none of us were scared.

I looked down only to see the beatiful view that we had of the mountains and the small town, but other than that I did not look down at the large rock that I was in the middle of climbing.  There were some scary moments but I came out of it just fine.

It was a really nice experience that I have never had before and don't know when I will have the chance to do it again.  This was the first time that I have done rock climbing outside of the high school gym's rock wall, and the rock walls at REI.

After the climb we went to see the Cascade de Rouget,the largest waterfall in all of Europe, it was a short ten minutes away from where we climbed.  It was very beautiful and it cooled us off very nicely, after three hours in the sun, it was 28C (83F) again today!  It was a really beautiful day and Anne said one of the last nice weekends to go climbing, because we have concerts almost every weekend with the Harmonie and after May, it is going to get really hot.

I had a really nice time and this will be added to my collection of amazing experiences in France!

I have a long day ahead of me at school tomorrow, I am going to head off!

Bonne Journée tout le monde!

Another Day Brings Another Friend

I have been happily surprised by everything that happens to me here in France.

What I mean by the title is that there are always new people that you meet, that you talk to and that you connect with.

Even if it is a simple smile from someone, it means a lot to me.
Since the beginning of my experience I have made new friends practically every day, sure there are days where I don't stop to say hi to every single person that I have ever seen.  There are some particular days like today where I want to dance around the school and say hi to everyone, even if I don't really know them, just to introduce myself so that the next time our paths cross I will have an excuse to go say hi!

Everyone is so nice, so I have no problem saying hi to almost everyone :)

Today was skirt day and a day of respect (Journée de la jupe et du respect).

Almost all of the girls came in skirts or dresses and even some of the guys, I admit it was kind of weird.

One of my new friends is Valentin, he is in my Phys Ed class and he is very nice.  I promised him that I would add him into one of my posts :)

Life is still extremely normal, I feel like I should be giving you guys more details, but seriously, it is all routine now.
6:45am First alarm, hit snooze
6:55am Second alarm, hit snooze
7:05am Third and Final alarm, contemplate getting up and decide that turning on the light will do.
7:12am I sit up and decide to climb down the ladder.
7:20am get dressed and go downstairs.
7:25am eat a bowl of Special K dark chocolat cereal
7:45am leave for school
7:55am bell rings for first period
(I am not going to go through my school day, it is pretty boring, except for all of the people that I see)
5:50pm last period bell rings
5:55pm start walking kind of slowly to the house after saying goodbye to my friends
6:17pm arrive at the house and put my back pack down and say hi to everyone
7:45pm eat dinner (it depends what day and what time Anne comes home for dinner, ex Mondays I eat at 9pm when I get home from karate or 7:30pm on Fridays because we have to leave at 8pm for band practice)
8:00pm sit down in front of the TV to watch the nightly news and sometimes watch a film
10:00pm go upstaris to brush my teeth and go to sleep (and write in my daily journal that I will make into a book when I get home all about my experience!!)

The process repeats the next morning and the next, I think that you understand.
I have been accepted to a one week music "stage" (I am not quite sure how to say it in English, it is essentially one week of doing nothing but playing music, seriously it is at least 6 hours of music playing every day.)
It will be the first week of April vacation, which starts the 23rd and I am so excited, I am going with Adélie but I am going to make the friends of a lifetime!! A week full of music with band geek buddies! I have missed my band geek buddies since there is no band at high school in France.

The second week of April vacation will be spent in Montpellier with the grandparents (Adélie's not mine) but I am excited to return down there, I am afraid that it will be very hot though.

It hit near 27 C today, which was nice in a dress but not so much in jeans.
This spring is very nice and the warm weather came very quickly!

Adélie told me that the summers in Bonneville can be very hot and sticky, not exactly the perfect kind of summer weather, but we'll see if this summer will be as record hot as last year in New England, 100F in NY wow!

I hope that the snow has started to melt and that the spring flowers are starting to come, or maybe the rain has come.  They always say "April showers bring May flowers"!
Let's hope so!

Have a happy spring everyone and I will post again after April vacation!

A Bientôt!